Let's ask this straight up: why would anyone at a news organization think that hacking and tapping phones is okay?

We're not even talking about the fact that they might have done this to victims from 9/11, but that makes it even worse.

Rupert Murdoch arrived in London yesterday for a few different reasons, but the one he wasn't expecting was to be hit with the claim that News of the World reporters hacked the phones of 9/11 victims.

The claim came from a former NY cop. He alleged that NOTW journalists contact him and offered to pay him if he would provide them with private phone records of the dead from 9/11.

They wanted the phone numbers and a list of calls they made leading up to the attack.

“This investigator is used by a lot of journalists in America and he recently told me that he was asked to hack into the 9/11 victims’ private phone data. He said that the journalists asked him to access records showing the calls that had been made to and from the mobile phones belonging to the victims and their relatives.

“His presumption was that they wanted the information so they could hack into the relevant voicemails, just like it has been shown they have done in the UK. The PI said he had to turn the job down. He knew how insensitive such research would be, and how bad it would look.

“The investigator said the journalists seemed particularly interested in getting the phone records belonging to the British victims of the attacks.”

That's just disgusting. How can anyone even bring themselves to ask for something like that? We're extremely glad the P.I. turned it down.

That kind of privacy should never be broken. We'll never understand how the people over at NOTW thought these were okay ideas, and we're pulling for them to be punished appropriately!

We also wonder if a huge company like this can hack for so long without being caught just how many other people out there are doing it. Kind of a scary thought.

The press aren't the scariest part of all this - we're used to the press and politicians behaving badly but in a lot of these cases its police and drs who are selling info to the papers. who do you go to when you can't trust the police? i will never go to the police again and neither will a lot of people i know. its now the people vs the police in the UK.

"The fact that they might have done this to victims from 9/11, but that makes it even worse."
Worse than them hacking the phones of families of dead war heroes and a murdered schoolgirl? The fact they hacked yet more people's phones adds to the issue, but it is not "even worse" just because they're American.

If they were investigating the actual occurrence of 9/11 by trying to find links from the calls, that would be one thing…but this looks like simple ambulance chasing, only one rung lower. I think of it as grief sensationalism to sell/move papers.